AS JI SEONG HO says in BBC Panorama’s North Korea Undercover, “In North Korea if you say the wrong thing, you will die. You will be sent to a political prison camp.

“Even if one knows, sees or hears something one must pretend to be ignorant. Disagreement isn’t an option. Disagreement means death.”

Ho defected from the regime, as did many of the other contributors former BBC reporter John Sweeney spoke to for the controversial documentary and accompanying book which sheds light on the ‘dark’ state.

There are defectors from the mass labour gulag camps, where more than 100,000 North Koreans are thought be held.

Sweeney spent eight days in the totalitarian state. Along with his wife, Tomiko Newson, he posed as a member of the London School of Economics’ student society, the Grimshaw Club, to gain access.

The reporter, also behind the 2007 Scientology And Me film, does not regret posing as an academic.

Speaking the day before BBC News announced it was cutting all its staff reporters on Panorama, including Sweeney, he told The Argus.

“I don’t lose sleep about this. Remember everyone who went on the trip paid £3,000. Would you go on holiday with a man called John Sweeney you’d not met without looking him up?”

Programme makers told the students a journalist was on the trip but did not reveal it was John Sweeney from Panorama.

The LSE called on the BBC not to broadcast the programme. Later the LSE director complained about the risks to which the students were exposed. The BBC screened it on the basis of ‘strong public interest’.

More than a year after the 30-minute programmed aired, and following a BBC Trust report (there were four upheld complaints, including one by the father of one of the students), the BBC has now apologised to the LSE for the show.

“I will apologise to people of North Korea because we don’t tell their story powerfully enough. I don’t apologise for what we did.

“What we did was break North Korean rules and law that prevents people from scrutinising this dark state. That’s what journalists should do.”

“People in North Korea have no true understanding of the outside world. The Americans are painted as the darkest monsters and we are next. It’s entirely untrue and rubbish.

“My book on Scientology and my book on North Korea are in some ways very similar – they are both experts on brainwashing. Brainwashing works where you can throttle information.

“I believe the BBC should have service for North and South Korea is to challenge that constriction.”

The realisation a BBC Korea Service would be a good idea dawned on Sweeney as one of the students in the group started to pick up news from South Korea when they were in the Korean Demilitarised Zone which separates two Korean states.

He believes there could be a popular uprising, too. North Koreans would trust foreign news reports, he thinks. His research with defectors, whose escape is often prompted by listening to foreign broadcasts, is evidence.

“The reason I am confident that might happen one day is I went to Romania in 1995 before the revolution. I’ve seen tyranny, which looked absolutely stone dead, and there was no sense four years on there would be a violent and bloody over throw of the tyrants.

“But statues of stone can crumble to dust... One day that will happen in North Korea.”

In Romania one can now live a life without politics. One can go on strike. It feels like a Spain or Italy, albeit rather poorer, rather than an isolated dictatorship.

Still, North Korea’s isolation is extreme.

“The Planetarium in Pyongyang is so spooky and surreal. It’s haunting going there, the idea that people in the 21st century live locked up in this weird madness, where they don’t know the Americans have landed on the moon, they don’t know who Michael Jackson is.”

All they know is the Kim dynasty, which rules over the place as if demigods and has controlled North Korea since 1948.

“The working hypothesis of North Korea Undercover is that Kim Jong Un’s talk of nuclear war is a confidence trick and that the Pyongyang bluff is blinding us to a human rights tragedy.

“To make the confidence trick work, the regime keeps everybody – outsiders and its own people – in the dark.”

He doesn’t believe the nuclear threat is false but it is also a threat upon which they can’t deliver.

“Let’s worry about the gulag. One day we will see them and what happened.”

The problem facing the third Kim generation, the baby-faced Kim Jong Un, is having to modernise and at the same time feed a population suffering malnutrition, a situation best shown by the fact the average height of South Koreans is three inches taller than North Koreans.

Sweeney has written how Britain’s role as a trading nation made us democratic because our merchants wanted honest news. They demanded good scientists and good weather men to trade. This is the trap Kim Jung Un is in.

“The moment you modernise the economy you open up the world. And the moment he does that is the moment North Koreans see people in South Korea and the West living lives of unimaginable pleasure and happiness.

“We have all got problems but not starvation. They can’t open up. If they do they are dead. The egime is dead.

“So this guy lives in gilded cage. He is in terror of tomorrow.”

John Sweeney, North Korea Undercover – Inside The World’s Most Secret State is at Lewes Speakers Festival All Saints Centre, Friars Walk, Lewes, Sunday, July 20, 8.30pm.

Festival pass, £80. One-day pass, £45. Two-day pass, £70. Single event tickets are £12.50. Call 0333 666 3366. Visit www.lewesspeakers festival.com for full line-up.